I HATE TO SAY IT, but I think it might be happening folks. Last week, I found myself on a webpage that was advertising the Kindle, the latest hand-held electronic reader, which was launched last year by Amazon.com and which will soon be making its way to our shores, writes John Butler.
In the course of a couple of minutes of reading, in my mind the possible obsolescence of the bookshop went from seeming like a ludicrous delusional fantasy of an army of soulless technocrats, to a logical next step. There have been plenty of e-readers to date; paperback-sized screens that display and electronically store books. None of the precursors to the Kindle have managed to capture the imagination of the public or make good on the sinister promise of a book-free world in the future.
But this incarnation of the e-reader should be viewed as a very real, grave and gathering danger. There are few online services with the network and reach of Amazon. Not only do they have the resources to digitise the world's library, but many individual features of the device are pretty damn smart, too. First up, something called "electronic page display" makes the experience of reading the Kindle more like reading words on a page than with previous models.
This is more than an antiquarian preference of the kind that sees people downloading an old "ring-ring" tone on to their mobile. I've always fallen victim to eyestrain after reading for a long period of time on any computer screen, but the Kindle reflects light in the same manner as ordinary paper and accurately mimics the look of ink on a page. Buy a book and have it wirelessly delivered to your Kindle in under a minute. Press a button to turn the page. No need to balance a napkin ring on the unused page, or a fork across the spine. There's no need to move onto your other elbow or rearrange the pillows every second page, either.
The Kindle costs about $350 (€277) , but when it does arrive, it comes with a set of answers to nearly all the questions the book lover might pose - what you might call the spiritual arguments against. I, too, like the look of a book on the shelf, and you can't beat the way it feels to hold a new hardback and flip the pages to release the bookish fragrance under your nose. Additionally, I do like to collect a physical product and to see them in a house. Well I hate to say it, but substitute the word "vinyl" for "book" and you get an idea of where we might be heading. We may not like it, but in a way that's immaterial.
I remember holding an MP3 player in my hand for the first time in 1999 and scoffing at a friend who suggested that the high street record shops would be under threat in a decade. Here we are less than 10 years on and he was right after all. Shopping for a CD in HMV now has a pound-shop feel to it. As I trip over piles of merchandise and fight my way through crowds, I'm unconvinced that all these signs of a busy store will be enough to prevent it from disappearing. And perhaps it's right in the end to divorce the romance of reading a book from the act of buying one.
Resistance is borne along on a kind of desperation. The major record labels have reacted like utter swine to the disintegration of the music industry, and it is for this reason that I've watched the house of cards fall down with a degree of wry amusement. Of course, I feel a lot of sympathy for young bands trying to get signed in a marketplace that is being squeezed on all sides, but it seems like they might be able to continue drawing in revenue and increasing their fan base by playing live music, whereas the executives seem to expect a divine right to pots of money.
But the publishing industry can only collapse in the same way as the recorded music industry when people start to illegally share their books. Until recently, I couldn't understand how this might be possible. But now I'm wondering who'll be the Metallica of the book world, raging in court against all the downloaders? My money's on Martin Amis.
The effects of a book-free world would be interesting to behold. No books might mean no bookshelves, and perhaps the art market will be a beneficiary of all this new real estate on either side of the chimney breast. That is until the full-size digital frame finally supplants the pleasure of a real painting. The Kindle also offers the prospect of auto-publishing to writers, which means that an author can directly upload their material to the Kindle service and charge a fee for downloads of the material. What writer would refuse to allow somebody to pay for a digital version of their material, particularly if it meant they didn't need to pay 15 per cent to an agent and God knows how much to the publisher?
The Kindle already offers New York Times bestsellers for $10 (€6.50) and can hold 200 books. With this saving of physical space and materials, we might see the collision of two previously simpatico ethical beliefs - that of helping to save the planet by choosing alternatives to paper, and the belief that reading books is a worthy activity in and of itself.
Having spent much of the last few years travelling, I always identified the simple act of putting books on a shelf with finding myself a home, and now that I have stopped travelling, it seems like this symbolic expression might become obsolete. For the ultimate marriage of form and content, I guess I'll buy the Kindle instead, and download The Tipping Point.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com